EASTER IV, Year A, April 17, 2005
The Rev. Wray MacKay
The Lord is my Shepherd.
I have never preached on Psalm 23.
That is strange, since it is one of the most used psalms in the Lectionary.
Or perhaps it’s very familiarity means passing it over.
This morning, I change all that.
Psalm 23.
The Psalm begins with a familiar but startling declaration:
The Lord is my shepherd.
To me two very different and seemingly incompatible things
are being equated.
YHWH --
the personal yet unutterable name of Israel’s God
rendered audibly as Adonai or Lord in Jewish tradition --
is defined as a caretaker of sheep!
We are forced to contemplate the unexpected.
We are not saying the Lord is like a Shepherd.
We are saying the Lord IS my Shepherd.
YHWH -- the Lord -- and Shepherds do exactly the same thing
We are forced to think of the divine creator of the world
as a semi-nomadic herder.
And by this we are forced to think again
about the nature and character of God deepest being.
But in that very same string of words,
we are also struck by something else: the pronoun.
The Lord is MY Shepherd.
The pronoun is crucial.
It speaks of an intimate connection between the psalmist and YHWH.
And indeed WE ourselves are also and immediately
drawn into the psalm as we see ourselves in that pronoun,
as we see the Lord as my shepherd.
But that pronoun also says something about us:
If YHWH is my shepherd, then the author of the psalm
-- and we -- are the sheep.
Now this is not the rational musings of a human theologian.
It is the candid and existential meditation on life
in the company of the beloved shepherd.
The emphasis is not the brilliance -- or stupidity -- of the sheep
so much as the trust the sheep continuously puts in the shepherd.
We are invited to picture a sheep bleating the words of Psalm 23,
keeping in mind how life looks from the animal’s perspective.
As we do so, “the Lord as shepherd” metaphor
becomes increasingly powerful.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross tells the story of a little boy
with whom she once worked who was in the final stages of leukemia. She asked him to draw a picture
that showed her how he was feeling about his illness.
He drew a dark and scary self-portrait
with thunderclouds in the sky
and a cannon pointed directly at his heart.
When the doctor saw it,
she did not say anything or try to change his feelings.
Instead, she quietly took the picture and added something to it.
She sketched a figure of herself in a white coat,
standing close to the little boy in the picture,
facing the cannon with him, her arms securely around his shoulders.
A few days later, her young patient drew another picture, all on his own.
In this one the sun was shining, there were flowers everywhere
and his self-portrait was most notable for the smile on his face.
Of course children understand the simple wonder of faith --
far more that we do --
we who have been callused and hardened
by the toils and angers of life.
In that interchange between doctor and child --
and the resilient response of the child
to the bottomless void of uncertainty in his life --
we have the most basic understanding of the 23rd psalm.
It is a statement of trust and hope in the utter reliability of God.
It is a statement about God who stands with us
in the face of unimaginable fear and senseless suffering,
at the times of our greatest anxieties and uncertainties.
You know, we most often lean upon the strength of this familiar psalm
at times of sudden or tragic death.
I think this is mistaken.
I think we minimize the power of Psalm 23
by boxing it into the final chapters of life,
by using it almost exclusively at the time of death.
In fact, this psalm is what’s called a pilgrimage psalm,
that is, a song of emphatic hope
sung out by living pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem,
pilgrims whose physical journey
mirrors the spiritual journey of life.
This is living folk -- this is us --
as we wander through both the lush times and the arid times
in a faithful search for the presence of God.
This is us now, as we move in pain and awkwardness and uncertainty
through these times of profound change
in our parish and in our personal lives.
It is emphatically a Psalm for us, the living.
Just take that profound, beautiful phrase we say so automatically,
and which brings to mind many funerals,
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I shall fear no evil: for thou art with me;
thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
As melodious as the seventeenth-century English is, however,
it is an erroneous translation of the original Hebrew words.
It is not a valley of the shadow of death,
but rather a valley of deep darkness.
Do you see the difference?
A valley of the shadow of death -- speaks to just that, death.
But a valley of deep darkness -- speaks to the living.
It speaks of a place of danger and treachery and fear right now,
a place where we find often find ourselves
at many different stages of our lives -- our living lives.
and not just when we are facing death.
It is a prayer we can pray now, whenever we do not see light.
It is a prayer we can pray now, when we want to face our living fears.
It is a prayer for the living.
It is a prayer for St. Paul’s. It is a prayer for each one of us.
The Washington Post carried a review
of former President Bill Clinton’s memoir by David Maraniss,
who himself won a Pulitzer Prize
for his coverage of the Clinton administration
& also wrote a celebrated 1995 biography on the same subject.
In the review, Maraniss suggests that nine-tenths of a human life
remains hidden to a biographer.
So what he was looking for in Clinton was “subterranean territory.”
To be sure, he found some.
It seems that the struggle between light and darkness
had been and was a common theme in Clinton’s life.
Maraniss recounts a lecture Clinton gave at the University of Arkansas
in which he discussed the characters
in Robert Penn Warren’s All the Kings Men
and other political leaders.
They were all a mixture of light and darkness, said Clinton—
the darkness of insecurity, depression, family disorder.
But in the great leaders, light overcame darkness.
Maraniss also recounts an interview in which spiritual questions came up.
Clinton reported his deep yearning
for an integration of mind, body and spirit.
Looking back on his life,
Clinton said that the demons of self-doubt and fear of destruction
were the chief culprits to achieving his coveted spiritual goal.
The last thing he wanted to do
was to allow the outside world to see those demons
that he tried to keep hidden in the inner recesses of his internal life. Then, in what Maraniss reports as
the most chilling declarative sentence in the book,
Clinton confesses, It was dark down there.
It was dark down there in the valley of deep darkness --
in the life of the living.
But there’s more living imagery in the psalm than the darkness picture.
Although shepherd imagery may seem anachronistic
in the urban, technological setting of our fast-forward lives
it is important to know what the psalmist is trying to say
through these metaphorical words.
Thus, William Sloane Coffin observed that the shepherd image in Psalm 23
is an Eastern image, rather than a Western image.
It is an image of a shepherd leading out front,
not a shepherd driving the flock from behind.
God does not push us, hustle us, make demands on us.
Rather, our God guides us with gentle wisdom and a familiar voice.
As members of God’s flock,
we are not expected to rush, to do, to succeed, to produce.
Rather, we are called to receive, to accept, to trust, and to respond.
The verb tenses in this psalm are indicative, not imperative.
These are not orders from the Commanding General God.
They are, instead, a lush and luminous description
of the way things already are in the presence of a loving God.
Just so, what God the Shepherd provides in this psalm is astounding,
particularly when we understand
the geography surrounding Palestinian shepherding.
Green pastures are almost non-existent.
Still waters are very hard, and at times, impossible to find.
And those dark valleys are surrounded by craggy rocks --
the perfect playground for thieves and robbers
intent on violence and murder.
So, picture pilgrims using this psalm
as they ascend to Jerusalem from Jericho,
acknowledging God’s protection and nourishment
in the midst the austerity and difficulty of life.
As they sing out God’s presence
among green pastures and still waters and safe paths,
they are responding like that little boy who was scared to die.
God does not take away the dark cannons of trouble pointing at us.
No, rather, God stands with us in our troubles,
providing a dependable arm around our shoulders.
It is this certainty that we cultivate to surround ourselves with God,
to drench ourselves with the light of God in the valley of deep darkness.
Fifteen years ago when I was Rector at St. Peter’s New York City,
[Gary take note]
the congregation I served was experiencing, to put it mildly,
some deep financial difficulty.
[So what else is new!]
The church tower of heavy Spuyten-divel blue granite
might collapse at any time
because the binding mortar was turning to dust.
Well, the good people of St. Peter’s
had been working around the clock for years
to raise the needed money,
but the sums seemed out of sight -- up to a million dollars.
During some winter retreat time in Nantucket that year,
I walked the cold and deserted beaches
literally shouting my anger at God, even shaking my fist at God,
for putting such a good people through so much.
Eventually all that bitching and moaning helped a bit, and I calmed down.
And it came to me that the word that God was communicating to me
was that this people I was so protective of
were in fact the rock of the earth,
with the very rock of the faith of Peter.
They were solid.
I should be giving thanks for them, not abusing God for not protecting them.
Somewhat mollified, I returned to New York City
and told my people what I had learned.
They were, I think, deeply appreciative of my anger on their behalf,
but they were also somewhat bemused
that I thought they couldn’t continue to do
what God was calling them to do.
But the most unexpected part of this story came about a month later.
I opened an innocuous letter addressed to the Vicar of St. Peter’s
and found within an official document that said:
upon notarizing receipt of this letter, and returning it to us [a law firm] you will receive in the return main a check for $375,000,
with a check of equal or greater amount to be sent in two months time.
The bequest was from an old lady
who had been in a nursing home for some twenty years,
someone the church had lost track of during the transition of Vicars.
I even remembered her then from my first years at St. Peter’s in the fifties.
But though we had forgotten about her, she hadn’t forgotten about us.
I remembered that earlier in her life as a single woman,
St. Peter’s had been her family
the concrete expression of God’s love and care in her life.
And every Sunday, Jesus, as the Good Shepherd, smiled down at her
as a figure gracefully portrayed
in one of the church’s Tiffany stained glass windows.
Friends, this woman saw death as positive and liberating --
a transition into a new life
where she would dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Because of this, she was easily able to let go of her material possessions,
carefully and lovingly distributing her wealth
in ways that would affirm life among those who were left behind.
Well, it was my delight to take my two hard working wardens
to a mysterious breakfast the next morning,
and after eating a bit, placing this letter before them.
A moment I will treasure forever.
Mouths, literally, dropped open.
The letter was read over and over.
And the smiles. Oh the smiles.
Well, this kind of outcome is not always so dramatically forthcoming.
Indeed, as I said, the good people of St. Peter’s
had been working long and hard for years
to put the church back together
and we had to keep on working hard, and we did.
But you can well imagine that I and this people
had our basic, simple trust in God raised a few notches.
For in the valley of deep darkness a great light had shone.
Through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God,
and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit,
we found our trust in one God, whom alone we worship and serve,
deepened and strengthened.
This is not a statement of rationality; it a declaration of trust.
This is not a physical fact; it is a spiritual hope.
This is not a delusion; it is truth.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
Friends, there is nothing we really need, that we will not receive.
We shall fear no evil, for thou art with us.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our lives
and we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
This is the promise that lives and breathes and moves among us.
And because of this astounding gift of lavish grace,
we are called to be lavish with the gifts of our lives.
Reckless? Maybe.
Foolish? Most likely.
But this is the only way to live abundant life abundantly.
May it be so, for you and for me.
